Hottest Grandpa Wang Deshun

 And what, beyond those well-defined pecs, can he tell us about eternal youth and vitality? He shared his wisdom with us. 

The Secrets of the 84-Year-Old Chinese Runway Model.

He looks great without his shirt on. Many people have noticed. Casting directors and fashion designers in his home country and around the globe—they have seen the glory of Wang Deshun and know he looks as good as men a quarter his age. But how did an obscure artist who survived the Cultural Revolution become a viral sensation and suddenly the surreal, sexy center of Fashion Week? 

The legend of Hottest Grandpa began one March evening two years ago, during Fashion Week in Beijing. Hottest Grandpa, who is 84 (born 1936) now, with an unruly Confucian Vandyke, stood backstage as minions coiffed his corona of white hair and tenderized his hairless chest with baby oil, his pecs pulsating to a techno beat of their own. He was fitted with padded cotton pants, and the designer, Hu Sheguang, shared with him that evening’s plan. He—Hottest Grandpa—would perform a pantomime to begin the show, a scene in which he would battle a high wind, and then later would lead the female models out for their curtain call. No other male models, just him. And because the female models had their faces gift-wrapped, wearing little steampunk glasses and cat ears, his was the only face—and flesh—truly visible.

In that comparatively calm backstage moment before the walk, as he was being fussed over one last time, Hottest Grandpa wasn’t yet Hottest Grandpa. To the 1.4 billion people of China, he wasn’t even lao xianrou, a name soon affixed to him, which translates as, of course, Old Fresh Meat. He hadn’t yet established himself as the next frontier, the new nexus where sex and old age meet to look ageless and sexy again (prompting people on YouTube to praise Grandpa’s “gorgeous stomach”), nor had he given his TED-like talks about the walk. He was just Wang Deshun, he of a wife, two children, and a grandkid, who when he took his shirt off seemed as if he’d just blown in from frolicking in the Fountain of Youth with a bunch of Chippendales dancers.

How he came to be here was its own story. The designer, Hu, had been consulting with the show’s DJ, a woman named QQ, when QQ’s phone rang and a picture of her aged father appeared on the screen. Hu’s reaction was instant: He had to have him! What Hu wanted from Wang now was a bare-chested finale, Hottest Grandpa stripped to the waist, all flexed and baby-oiled. Wang nodded his head, sure, but what about the police? What if they charged him with obscenity?